In your working experience...

[delanvital]

...have you been in a position where you have suddenly realised that some skill or knowledge that used to be available had been lost? Real life examples:

• Blueprints room have been renovated and post-it stickers have been thrown out and drawings put into nice rolls. Problem - technicians could not use the drawings w/o the key values on the stickers and drawings were rendered to useless data.
• The engines in the Concorde can not be rebuilt today, the knowledge is lost. They know how to repair and maintain, but not construct.
• NASA has lost many skills as key people have been moved around in the organisation and no one as any idea who they specifically were and where they ended up, being unable to locate the person again. Etc.

Have you experienced anything like that? Somewhat similar? Typically tacit knowledge in key people being lost as they move to other firms, someone ****ing up key explicit data because of lack of understanding of context, or bad information management systems that does not store context (i.e. just storing 25 degrees temperature but not where, when etc).

[Bastet]

My predesesor at work used the pile of paper sorting system for his desk, and the pile of parts sorting system for the warehouse. Between cleaning both piles several key bits of information where lost due to me not understanding *** it was about, and him not wanting to spend time properly instructing me. On the long therm its not too important, cause i had to redo a ton of stuff anyway, but short therm losing some of the items is a bloody puta.
 
At least now its all filed, properly, on a computer, which daily backups.

[Sithvid]

Gandalf the Grey lost some knowledge and learned some new and became Gandalf the white.

 We just have to live with who we are along the spectrum of colours that we go through in life.

[Bastet]

Gandalf the Grey lost some knowledge and learned some new and became Gandalf the white.
 
We just have to live with who we are along the spectrum of colours that we go through in life.

Watching LOTR doesnt constitute to work experience :narnar:

[Nefertem]

Watching LOTR doesnt constitute to work experience :narnar:

Does that mean I gotta take it off my CV? :sad:

[T-Bag]

I lost a set-list I needed for a gig once, it was ok because I just asked the guitarist what song was next. Crisis averted.

I assume thats the sort of thing you were after?

[Sithvid]

Watching LOTR doesnt constitute to work experience :narnar:

Guess I'd better look for another job.

[Benny]

I've lost my Friday because some tool didn't do something quick enough at work on Wednesday. I'd elaborate but someone here could potentially work for the people it affected..

I hate everyone else.

[Carr0t]

Was speaking to my bro about this over the weekend. He works as a programmer for Barclays, and some of their key systems have parts written in assembler for speed (John Carmack wrote some of the Quake 2 engine code in assembler for the same reason, I seem to recall). But noone ever learns assembler any more. Sure, they have a vague idea of how machine code works from a 1 term course (if that) at Uni, but noone ever gets taught it properly.

So whenever any changes have to be done to the assembler, assuming that you can find anyone at all who ever coded in it, the person you find is likely to be a managing director now who last touched any code at all 10 or more years ago, so it takes them time to get back up to speed and what they produce is unlikely to be the best. And sooner or later they'll all have retired and there won't be anyone left who knows assembler.

I seem to recall that there is even a section in the Linux Kernel written in assembler, with a comment above it saying something along the lines of:

/* MAGIC: We don't know what this does, but if you remove it the kernel panics */
---assembler code is here---

[delanvital]

Cheers for the feedback. Some interesting ones in there Keep em coming if you got more...

[suicidal_monkey]

I was supposed to be using an in-house piece of software written at the University for tests towards the end of my PhD, and although there is some documentation for it and in general the code looks quite neat and full of comments when I tried to run simulation myself I got warning messages claiming there were errors in the code. far too much code, I might add, to have any hope of understanding within any sort of reasonably short time period -- plus, it should "just work"as it had done when the guy who was writing/managing it had demonstrated it working just fine but he had left and the only other person who knew anything about it worked as Toshiba and was not readily available to assist, and unfortunately he didn't seem to understand how it was that the original programmer had meant to use the program to analyse my data in the manner which the original programmer had done.:g:

[delanvital]

Cheers for everyone's feedback. This was what I wanted and it was very interesting to read

[Nefertem]

At my former work in Oslo, the computer administrator quit his job for a better one.. He had been at the company from the very beginning and knew everything there was to know.. Unfortunely his successor knew nothing and had to be taught a lot of things.. But the weeks where he (the successor) was suppose to learn the things he was ill.. and that combined with a CEO with a god-complex (he did modifications and stuff himself without consulting the programmers and technicians, and often with a very poor result) made it so that noone really knew what to do..
I had resigned about the same time as the administrator, and about a month after we had left 10 more people were fired, and the company is now in deep **** and on the verge of bankruptcy, and on top of that currently in a trial where a former employee have sued them for firing him for the wrong reasons (the CEO/Boss guy fired him after the employee had delivered his resignation because they had a discussion about some work)

[delanvital]

Really cool post Nefertem

[FBG]

I think the most common occurence of this happening is when you use freelancers. Many of the projects we work on will require extra or specialist resource so we get freelancers in with the required knowledge.
 
Once the project is finished and the freelancers have been kicked to the kurb we'll then realise phases 2 and 3 of the project revolve around the work they've done.
 
Panic.
 
Fortunately, if not totally over resourced we'll have the skills in the team, but what happens then is you might be as good as the freelancer, but realise they've written everything in such a poor way you'd prefere to be stabbed repeatedly in the eyes than look at there code.
 
This happens all the time where i work.